The creation of text messages via the keypad of a hand-held wireless telephone in many European languages is relatively simple since all the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet can be represented on the keys of a standard phone keypad. However, some languages such as Chinese and Japanese use thousands of ideograms, some of which have the same readings as others. A common way of creating text messages including such ideograms is to make a phonetic input using a conventional keypad and then commanding a processor to list one or more ideogrammatic representations corresponding to such phonetic input. The user then selects the desired ideogrammatic representation for incorporation into the text message.